Excerpt - The Elders of Arkhide, chapter 2

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CHAPTER TWO

Mon glanced away from Aimee Five, from that copper-plated X-ray gaze of hers. She inhaled the sweet scents of the orbital station’s garden. The mint under the bamboo forest, the mist on leaves.


What could the Arkhideans possibly want from her?


She racked her brain. Had she made some big mistake the last time she was here? Did she owe them money?


“Sure you’ve got the right Listener?” she said, half-jokingly.


Aimee Five shifted forward again, toward Mon, fixing her with a stare that felt like a cortical scan.

“Personally, no, I am not. But I was overruled.”


The synth leaned back, glancing up and out, toward the windows. Toward Arkhide, her planet. That blue-white ball with the many brown spots of tiny islands and the many, many red spots of mighty volcanoes.


A very young, very seismically active planet, Arkhide should have been terraformed well before the migrants from the planet Wala settled permanently on it. But when Wala was destroyed in a hideous accident not even two generations ago, these pioneer Arkhideans were all that remained.


“Allen talked me into it,” Aimee Five continued, the hard brass of her voice softening. Her longtime advisor was the nicest, smilingest synthetic human Mon had ever met. “And your Heather.”


“Heather?” Mon said. She wasn’t following.


“Fine. Let me make it plain. We have a slight… issue on Arkhide. One that we think a Listener might be able to help us with. Problem is.” She speared Mon with another one of those bone-scan glances. “It isn’t something we want your Cooperative Realm to know about. Ever.”


The buzzing in her head must be insects near. But Mon didn’t dare break Aimee Five’s eye contact.


“You’re not tracking,” Mon said. “You’ve already decided I’m not trustworthy. Obviously. I’m Cooperative. Central Command, even.”


But Aimee was already speaking again in that rich, melodic soprano.


“Allen says, and Heather agrees, that you are no longer 3-C, if you ever were. You took the Cooperative’s coin because there was a war on and they offered good training cheap. Once they had a bead on you, they left you alone to spy and run solo missions, and you let them paint you as a rebel and a chaos agent. Great cover story. Fooled me, for a while.”


“Now the war’s over,” she continued, “and you’re already hiding things from the Co-op. Entire people, in fact.”


Mon pushed to her feet despite the tell it would be to the synth.


She couldn’t sit still with her life all spread out like that. She thought all those details—especially the clandestine parts—were deep off the grid.


Evidently not.


“How do you know all this?”


“We do our research, too,” Aimee Five said. “Plus, your Heather has the instincts of a fabulous spy. Too bad she can’t keep her mouth shut.”


She wasn’t wrong about that. But still, it didn’t add up.


“So you don’t want Heather, because she’ll talk. But why me?” Mon’s voice matched the disbelief in her mind. “Surely there must be other Listeners out there, others who could help you.” Although Co-op Central did try to scoop them up, all the ones they could find.


All the ones Mon had helped them find.


But she was done with that.


Aimee Five shook her head, her expression grim.


"Don’t think we didn’t look,” she said. “Heather put the basic Listeners’ test recordings on Arkhide’s chat boards, and everyone who thought they might be one took the test. Not one passed. No one came close. Listeners are one in tens of millions; we are only tens of thousands.”


For the first time since Mon had stepped into the garden clearing, Aimee Five’s perfect composure fractured just a bit.


That didn’t comfort Mon. She paced away from the synth, towards the tall, golden-tasseled corn stalks. The whirr of the wind through the tassels crowded her ears. 
So they knew all about her, and they didn’t trust her. Why should she care? What stake did she have in the synths’ problems?


“I don’t need a job,” Mon said.


“You’re going to walk away from a real problem?” Aimee Five said. She sighed theatrically. “So unlike you.”


“Not my problem,” Mon said. Facing away this time, she knew the synth couldn’t read her face. Luckily, because she was starting to waver.


Aimee Five sighed. “It’s such a puzzle,” she said. “Nobody’s been able to crack it.”


Dead hit. Mon never could turn down a puzzle. And an Arkhidean-proof puzzle? Safra’s tits, just the thought made had her salivating.


But a puzzle could come in a message packet. It didn’t need face-to-face.


“Fine,” she said, pacing back to stand in front of Aimee Five. “So you’ve done your homework on me. So you know I can keep my mouth shut. That’s not the problem. So what is it?”


Aimee Five touched her chest, where a human’s heart would be.


“May I have your word that, even if you don’t help us, you will not tell your former masters about us?”


She had no idea. 


Mon was done with  the Cooperative Realm. They’d forced her to recruit—to steal—Listeners from every edge of the system. She’d served her time; she’d paid her debts. She wasn’t giving them a single thing more. Ever.


Mon stopped directly in front of Aimee Five. She loomed over the seated synth.


"Yes.”


Aimee Five smiled, slow. She patted the bench where Mon had been sitting. Taking the power back.


Mon sat. It would be rude not to. But she slouched, resting her shoulders on the high back of the woven bench. She jammed her hands into the side pockets of her enviro-suit. This was the second time she’d come to a negotiation underdressed.


“On Arkhide, we have a base that’s underwater,” Aimee Five said.


“What?” Mon said. “I thought you-all avoided the water. And all this time you had an entire secret base?”


“We use it for… research.”


That didn’t sound sinister or anything.


And what about when that Co-op science sphere fell into the sea, and everyone on Arkhide nearly had a heart attack trying to get it out? Then again, the sphere had arrived without warning, and nobody knew it didn’t mean harm.


“The base is for research, as I said. And protection.” Aimee Five waved a perfectly tapered hand toward the planet. “We need to monitor seismic activity, constantly. The spot where the base is located gives particularly strong—and accurate—warning of impending trouble.”


“Volcanoes?”


“And earthquakes, and tsunamis. The base can usually give us two-days’ warning. Sometimes even three. With two days’ advance notice, we can move an entire city and all its peoples from an endangered island to a safer one. That’s where your Heather is now, helping with a migration.”


That sounded just plain impossible. Mon couldn’t stop to ponder that.


She glanced away from Aimee Five, her mind running down the implications. That couldn’t be all the base was doing. There must be something else.

Something the Cooperative would be more interested in than weather emergencies.


She glanced back and met Aimee Five’s gaze, her eyes narrowed.


“Okay, great. I’ll keep your secret. So spill.”


Aimee Five’s expression grew severe.
“I’m telling you this because the majority of the people of Arkhide voted in favor of it. I did not.”


Wow, so the entire planet knew all of Mon’s business. Fantastic.


“The base has been been picking up strange signals,” Aimee Five said. “Signals that we can’t decipher—and not for want of trying.”


Mon sat up straight.


“Signals?” she said. “Like you’ve never heard before?”


“Or seen,” Aimee Five said. “If it’s communication, part of it is outside our perception. It must be. And we’ve tried all manner of scans.” For the first time, frustration flattened her perfect bell of a voice. She took a breath.


“Your talents, Mondrian Delacroix, extend far beyond the mere scope of your Listener abilities,” she said. “Your exploits during the war and after show you possess a preternatural intuition, an ability to perceive patterns and possibilities that even our most advanced intelligences cannot replicate. Your mind is not bound by rigid constraints of programming or logic. It flows, like the tides of a thousand oceans.”


Yeah, so that was coming on strong. Despite herself, despite the lingering wariness pulsing through her mind, Mon felt a reluctant flush of heat rising up her nape. Was that admiration she detected in Aimee Five’s voice? Maybe, even, a hint of envy?


“You want me to go to an underwater research base, your only one,” Mon said. “To Listen. Try to understand. That’s it?”


“It’s not a simple assignment,” Aimee Five said. “I suggested we tap Heather. She said she is up for it.”


She would.


“You are absolutely not sending a seventeen-year-old down into some dank base underwater all by herself.”


Aimee Five mock-groaned. “Not you, too. I got an earful of that from Allen.” She flicked a hand, as if batting the idea away. “No, we are not. We’re asking you.”


Only now did Mon remember to negotiate. When the hook was sunk deep. She’d have to get better at this now that she was in the real world.


“What’s in it for me?” she said, knowing how weak her position was. “Room and board and no glory?”


Aimee Five threw back her head and laughed at that, the unexpected peal of amusement filling the garden clearing with silvery, sparkling mirth.


“Pretty much. No, listen. This data contains mysteries and, I expect, revelations that could shatter our current understanding of the very nature of this universe and our place within it. The scientists and analysts may be stymied, but you... you might unravel those knots, Mondrian Delacroix. Not as some glorified operative or spy, but as an autonomous explorer sailing uncharted seas of pure potentiality.”


Mon blinked, caught off-guard by the sheer audacity of Aimee Five’s proclamation. It struck chords of yearning and skepticism in equal measure, notes of both temptation and caution.


She found herself leaning forward despite her lingering reservations, drawn in by the synthetic woman’s sheer gravitational charisma and conviction.


Scanning for any sign of Mon’s true feelings on her face, Aimee Five’s expression sobered, the humor draining away like a receding tide, replaced by something fierce.


Slowly, unconsciously, Mon found herself nodding in mute acknowledgment of the possibilities unfurling before her. A sly, feral grin curved her lips as she held Aimee Five’s copper stare with her own liquid brown gaze.


The synthetic woman’s perfect features remained impassive, though Mon didn’t miss the answering glint of approval, of reciprocated ferocity, in her gaze.


Aimee Five rose from the bench in one sinuous motion, extending an elegant hand out towards Mon in silent invitation.


Steeling herself, Mon reached out and clasped the proffered hand. Aimee Five’s cool fingers offered a startling contrast to Mon’s own overheated palm.


“Follow me,” Aimee Five said.


From The Elders of Arkhide, out in January 2025. Join in on the KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN and get this story months before anybody else! Campaign runs until September 23.